Posts by kirkshanahan

No Alan, you don't 'got' me. First off, your experiments are not being conducted in a F&P electrolysis cell setup as I understand it, so you wouldn't expect to see at the electrode under the electrolyte recombination at all. If I'm wrong on that, I apologize. But if an F&P electrolysis cell can reliably be shown (i.e. reproducibly with control) to emit radiation, that might be a problem for an ATER mechanism. As I said to oystla, no problem. All 'proposed' chemical mechanisms are tentative anyway. Chemists learned that a long time ago. What would need to be done at that point then is to explain why a minor shift in calibration constant values can wipe out the 780 mW signal Storms obtained using 'conventional' means. ATER is simply my best guess as to what is going on. If I guessed wrong, so what?

But what I have observed so far is that what radiation results have been reported can (1) be explained by other means, or (2) are so irreproducible and so few in number as to not be reliable anyway. As I have tried to point out many times, my objective is to get the truth, not the fantasy. If the truth is 'LENR exists'. then so be it. No skin off my nose. But that can't be proven for F&P cells as long as my criticisms are ignored or misrepresented (as per JR's favorite paper).

No. Any kind of recombination, from any source, would always result in more water left in the cell than the expected amount. The amount of water in a cell and the amount added as make-up water is measured with precision. After a day or two it would be obvious there is recombination.

And if we could believe they accurately measured this water volume number you might be right, except for the fact that the one time it was reported in the literature, they measure 7% more volume coming out than they were supposed to get. So conservatively their measurements are in the +/- 10% range, which is not accurate enough. Further, they do not consider entrainment, which I believe ATER would alter, so that's an additional problem.

Your position on this is based in your faith in the CFR researchers. I base my position on reported facts.

This is enough on the invalidity of the CF field's truism on %recombination and how well it is measured from me.

And even 100% recombination would not explain my last calculation above.

By not working it out, you have stated something untrue.

Recombination should be accounted for in the F&P calorimetric equation with a gamma coefficient in the P/(P*-P) term, but F&P and others drop this because they believe their own truism mentioned in prior posts. This arbitrarily sets gamma = 1, and per Will, may allow for up to a 4% error.

The values of the P/(1-P) term (which I will call the Pterm below) for 25, 55, and 95C are respectively 0.0323, 0.1838, and 5.0317.

In F&P's Fig. 6A, the first excess heat value they indicate is 0.303W, which occurs at a rough cell temp of 55C. If we divide the reported excess heat by the Pterm value at 55C and then multiply by the 25C value, we get 0.053W or 53mW, which could certainly be a small % electrochemical recombination. Now, do the same from 95C and we get an estimated excess heat of 8.21W, just because of the change in the Pterm.

So to summarize, the reported excess heat could easily be a 'math trick'. It would seem to be about 50-60 mW at lower cell temps, but the Pterm effect magnifies this tremendously, for an approx. 600% error at 55C and a whopping approx. 15,500% error at 95C. Its obvious why F&P don't use their calorimetric approach at high T (close to boiling) but what they failed to realize is that the effect is big at their nominal operating temps too.

BTW, at 500mA current, the potential recombination heat is 770mW. 10% of that is 77mW. The estimated 53mW then is about 7% (so maybe there's a little ATER going on after all). The 303 mW is still less than 100% recombination (approx. 40%).

Well Kirk, so ATER is another ghostly phenomenon you propose, or do you have a paper proving the effect?

Not another, the same. And in case you forgot, it has the same characteristics as LENR, so your attempt to insult my proposed mechanism equally insults LENR as a 'ghostly' phenomenon.

I do have a paper proposing ATER as the cause of a heat distribution shift in F&P electrolysis cells, which in turn causes a calibration constant shift. ATER is a proposed mechanism, and if you can think of another one that causes heat distribution shifts, or one that explains the systematic trend noted in my paper, have at it! The more the merrier.

If drawn in a way to make it clear, yes, I agree, and I've written it up somehwere that I can't recall at the moment. The point is the Will model for electrochemical recombination does connect several points in the Figure, and drawing said line then revels a couple of clusters of data that lie above that line, i.e., with greater excess heat than expected by the model. So I have pointed to that very graph as evidence for ATER (which derives from non-electrochemical recombination in my parlance).

{EDIT: Storms used this graph in his 2006 attempt to rebutt my arguments, and I explained the problem in my response. Thermochimica Acta 441 (2006) 210 (Storms' paper is at p. 207.)}

F&P ran their cells well above 0,1 A/cm2, so there would be less than 5% recombination expected.

As I just remarked to Jed over in the 'Does LENR...' thread, your statement is based on a truism held in the CF community. That truism does not account for ATER. That's the point of my papers in the field.

If it did, it would be readily detected after a few days because there would be more water left in the cell than expected.

That statement has a couple of buried assumptions in it that I have pointed out many times. I believe the assumptions are incorrect. If someone could actually controllably reproduce the effect we might be able to prove that...

The amount that does occur produces heat at below milliwatt levels. That is to say, it produces thousands of times less than the heat from electrolysis, or anomalous heat when it occurs. There is no way such low levels of heat could affect x-ray film.

There's that truism again, "It (recomb.) can't go above 2%.". Wrong. The amount of potential recombination heat is easily calculated. It is current in amps times the thermoneutral voltage (1.54V for D, 1.43 for H as I recall). We have been looking at F&P's 1992-3 paper recently in another thread. One common current value there is 0.5A, so that means 0.77 W or 770 mW potential recombination heat. Not "thousands of times less than the heat from electrolysis", that fraction is also easily calculated as the ratio of the thermoneutral voltage to the cell voltage. In the F&P that was in the 5-10V range as I recall, giving a %recomb range of 30-60%.

No, not always. Check McKubre's papers, he reports recombiner failures due to getting electrolyte on them, which is why in the M series calorimeter (and perhaps others he built) he put a little cone-shaped barrier between the liquid level and the recombiner. And yes, when the recombiner stops working, the cells explode in some cases.

... or outside the cell, and it does not affect any other type of x-ray detector. This is easily confirmed in blank runs with Pt-H and with Pd-D runs that fail to produce excess heat.

Outside the cell is a different issue, agreed. The Cellucci paper you referenced suggests such happens. I personally doubt their explanation but I don't feel like giving you more info to trash without any thought.

This is the truism that the CF community holds onto for dear life. It isn't necessarily true. Just think of 'anomalous excess heat' as non-electrochemical recombination, and realize that this is the very issue I bring out with my publications in this field.

If this were a problem, why does it never happen with Pt-H and other control runs? Why does it only happen with Pd-D under certain well-defined electrochemical conditions when anomalous heat occurs? The anomalous heat cannot be the cause of it, because many cells are hotter in control runs with electrolysis heat only. (In other words, tests that do not produce excess power sometimes consume more power overall than the ones that produce excess heat plus input electrolysis power.)

In a 'normal' F&P electrolysis-type cell, there is no ATER. I would speculate that means the measured temperature is good for all parts of the cell, which means in IR space, everything is uniform, i.e., nothing to distinguish the cathode from the electrolyte from anything else in the vicinity. When ATER starts up, this produces a localized extra heat (not excess) that is transmitted through thermal conduction in the metal mesh, making it somewhat hotter than the electrolyte. Now one can distinguish differences in IR (heat) sensitive images. What the extent and duration of the heating is would be dependent on a lot of variables.

Note that a cell running hotter than one that shows anomalous excess heat is still thermally uniform, thus no image formation would result. It might be interesting to compare thermal fogging levels of different temp-time exposure profiles in non-AHE cells.

They did check the levels of recombination and found very smal percentage possible.

Yes but they were assuming only electrochemically driven recombination with dissolved oxygen was possible. That's one of the points about ATER. I assume bubbles can reach the other electrode, which negates the relevance of the electrochemical problem.

Not hydrogen contamination, although one source of heat would be recombination of slowly released hydrogen, which is a characteristic of 'good' cold fusion Pd.

The 'hypering' is a chemical sensitization of the light detecting materials in the film emulsion, usually silver nitrate. All films had exposure-density curves, where the density I am speaking of is the density of the 'pixels' (nitrate crystals actually) in the exposed and developed image. The curves are usually a rough sigmoidal shape. The lower exposure end required more exposure per unit density response. The hypering technique shortens or removes that portion of the curve, so one gets immediate strong response to low level exposure by light. Since the films are heat sensitive too, low level heat would have the same effect.

And as I pointed out, heat can produce very sharp images. Just look at the Optris stuff. The only question is was there enough to 'expose' the hypered film.

Also, I'd like to reiterate that from my earliest involvement with the CF field, I have never claimed any expertise w.r.t. problems with radiation measuring instruments, so I have little to say on that aspect of the problem, which Jed now retreats to to support his beliefs. But I still think one should try to determine if such problems exist as opposed to just accepting (without any critical thinking) something that rewrites textbooks.